The Road to Damascus by August Strindberg

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Miserables_. The peers naturally called him a renegade, and thesocialists a reformer. Number nine. Count Friedrich Leopold vonStollberg. He wrote a fanatical book for the Protestants, and thensuddenly became a Catholic! Inexplicable in a sensible man. Amiracle, eh? A little journey to Damascus, perhaps? Number ten.Lafayette. The heroic upholder of freedom, the revolutionary, whowas forced to leave France as a suspected reactionary, because hewanted to help Louis XVI; and then was captured by the Austriansand carried off to Olmuetz as a revolutionary! What was he inreality?

STRANGER. Both!

MELCHER. Yes, both. He had the two halves that made a whole--awhole man. Number eleven. Bismarck. A paradox. The honest diplomat,who maintained he'd discovered that to tell the truth was thegreatest of ruses. And so was compelled--by the Powers, I suppose?--to spend the last six years of his life unmasking himself as aconscious liar. You're tired. Then we'll stop now.

STRANGER. Yes, if one clings to the same ideas all one's life, andholds the same opinions, one grows old according to nature's laws,and gets called conservative, old-fashioned, out of date. But ifone goes on developing, keeping pace with one's own age, renewingoneself with the perennially youthful impulses of contemporarythought, one's called a waverer and a renegade.

MELCHER. That's as old as the world! But does an intelligent, manheed what he's called? One is, what one's becoming.

STRANGER. But who revises the periodically changing views ofcontemporary opinion?

MELCHER. You ought to answer that yourself, and indeed in this way.It is the Powers themselves who promulgate contemporary opinion, asthey develop in _apparent_ circles. Hegel, the philosopher of thepresent, himself dimorphous, for both a 'left'-minded and a'right'-minded Hegel can always be quoted, has best explained thecontradictions of life, of history and of the spirit, with his ownmagic formula. Thesis: affirmation; Antithesis: negation;Synthesis: comprehension! Young man, or rather, comparatively youngman! You began life by accepting everything, then went on todenying everything on principle. Now end your life by comprehendingeverything. Be exclusive no longer. Do not say: either--or, but:not only--but also! In a word, or two words rather, Humanity andResignation!

Curtain.

SCENE III

CHAPEL OF THE MONASTERY

[Choir of the Monastery Chapel. An open coffin with a bier clothand two burning candles. The CONFESSOR leads in the STRANGER by thehand. The STRANGER is dressed in the white shirt of the novice.]

CONFESSOR. Have you carefully considered the step you wish to take?

STRANGER. Very carefully.

CONFESSOR. Have you no more questions?

STRANGER. Questions? No.

CONFESSOR. Then stay here, whilst I fetch the Chapter and theFathers and Brothers, so that the solemn act may begin.

STRANGER. Yes. Let it come to pass.

(The CONFESSOR goes out. The STRANGER, left alone, is sunk inthought.)

TEMPTER (coming forward). Are you ready?

STRANGER. So ready, that I've no answer left for you.

TEMPTER. On the brink of the grave, I understand! You'll have tolie in your coffin and appear to die; the old Adam will be coveredwith three shovelfuls of earth, and a De Profundis will be sung.Then you'll rise again from the dead, having laid aside your oldname, and be baptized once more like a new-born child! What willyou be called? (The STRANGER does not reply.) It is written:Johannes, brother Johannes, because he preached in the wildernessand ...

STRANGER. Do not trouble me.

TEMPTER. Speak to me a little, before you depart into the longsilence. For you'll not be allowed to speak for a whole year.

STRANGER. All the better. Speaking at last becomes a vice, likedrinking. And why speak, if words do not cloak thoughts?

TEMPTER. _You_ at the graveside. ... Was life so bitter?

STRANGER. Yes. My life was.

TEMPTER. Did you never know one pleasure?

STRANGER. Yes, many pleasures; but they were very brief and seemedonly to exist in order to make the pain of their loss the sharper.

TEMPTER. Can't it be put the other way round: that pain exists inorder to make joy more keen?

STRANGER. It can be put in any way.

(A woman enters with a child to be baptized.)

TEMPTER. Look! A little mortal, who's to be consecrated tosuffering.

STRANGER. Poor child!

TEMPTER. A human history, that's about to begin. (A bridal couplecross the stage.) And there--what's loveliest, and most bitter.Adam and Eve in Paradise, that in a week will be a Hell, and in afortnight Paradise again.

STRANGER. What is loveliest, brightest! The first, the only, thelast that ever gave life meaning! I, too, once sat in the sunlighton a verandah, in the spring beneath the first tree to show newgreen, and a small crown crowned a head, and a white veil lay likethin morning mist over a face ... that was not that of a humanbeing. Then came darkness!

TEMPTER. Whence?

STRANGER. From the light itself. I know no more.

TEMPTER. It could only have been a shadow, for light is needed tothrow shadows; but for darkness no light is needed.